These are nice money for brand firms and lousy investments for those looking to communicate. All the data suggests they at best elicit a cursory glance and land in the bin.

We are reaching the end of the point of passive marketing vehicles. The shift needs to be active vehicles. Those that engage on mobile devices – you want to know about the product, download the app and explore it. You want to engage with us and learn more – download our app and join the conversation, watch vidoes, read relevant content fragments.

Think about it next time you ship a job off the printer. Ask if you have been seduced by a good pitch. You audience has moved on. Information consumption has shifted.

You don’t want to be the last one in your building with a fax machine. Don’t be the last producing passive marketing.

One of the cornerstones in Buddhist teaching is the removal of the uncessecary. Why have draws full of plates and bowls when you only need one? Essentially, creating constraints frees us. James latest email from his terrific blog applies the same logic to productivity. And he is right on the money.

Meanwhile, when we place a constraint on ourselves, it can become much easier to get something done. This is especially true if it is a constraint that forces us to start small.

If you want to start exercising, set a rule for yourself where you are not allowed to exercise for more than 5 minutes. You have to stop exercising after 5 minutes. I talked with a reader named Mitch who used this strategy to make his first six weeks of exercise very easy and then gradually built up to doing more. He ended up losing over 100 pounds. (Nice work, Mitch!)

If you want to become more creative, you can use constraints to drive your creativity. For example, you could write a book by only using 50 different words. This is the strategy Dr. Seuss used to write Green Eggs and Ham. (Full story here.)

If you want to eat more vegetables, you could limit yourself to only one type of vegetable this week. By limiting the number of choices you have to make, it’s more likely that you’ll actually eat something healthy rather than get overwhelmed trying to figure out all of the details of the perfect diet.

One point of frustration is Facebook’s ongoing squeezing of traffic to organic brand content. A digital agency exec described a recent meeting with Facebook that turned contentious. In what was meant to be a routine meeting, the exec said the Facebook rep told him the brands the agency works with would now have to pay Facebook for the same amount of reach they once enjoyed automatically. That position and Facebook’s perceived attitude have led to some disillusionment on Madison Avenue, where many bought into the dream peddled by Facebook that brands could set up shop on the platform as “publishers” and amass big audiences on their own….

…The cruel irony in all of this is that brands themselves greatly helped Facebook by giving it free advertising in their TV commercials and sites, urging their customers to “like” the brand — and paying Facebook to pile up likes. Facebook has returned the favor by choking off brands’ access to those communities. That’s one expensive and frustrating lesson that it’s better to own than rent.

As consumer still embrace “free” platforms – who doesn’t like the simple utility of sharing on your favourite social platform – big brands have no excuse. They have the chops, technology and budget to build their own content streams on land they own. John puts it well:

Yup. You leased your land, Mr. Brand Marketer, and the rent’s going up. If I were you, I’d get back to your own domain. Spend your money building something worthy, then spend to drive people there. Your agencies have entire creative and media departments that are good at just such practices. They might even spend a fair amount carefully purchasing distribution through Facebook’s streams. I’m guessing Facebook will be happy to take your money. But there’s no point in paying them twice.